"It's important not to be premature and jump to conclusions until all the information has come in, say Pentagon spokespeople. At this point all we know for sure is that [insert criteria for war crime] happened."

You start getting into hard calls with "Even though the building is painted white with big red crosses, it's actually the headquarters of an artillery unit." Or "Yes, there are a few patients there, but there is also a functioning military unit in the same building." I mean, you can't turn a tank into an ambulance by balancing an injured soldier on a stretcher on top, so there are issues where you talk about proportionality. But a functioning hospital is a functioning hospital regardless of who the patients are.

If there were weapons stored at the hospital, would it be a legal target? I'm asking because they article mentions the possibility and because I got my legal training in rules of war from an episode of M.A.S.H. where somebody wanted to use the 4077th as an ammo dump and Hawkeye protested that then the hospital could be shelled.

This case kind of baffles me, honestly, because I really don't see it being a "oops we fucked up" kind of situation, except inasmuch as the "we thought we'd get less embarrassed publicly", no matter how much the Pentagon is trying to pretend it is. So what was the thinking anyway? Was it some kind of collective punishment thing directed against people they thought (accurately I guess in a technical sense) were helping the Taliban, similar to the versions of this that we see with the IDF? The fact that it sounds like the CIA was involved makes me think that might be it because it certainly sounds like that kind of thing they get up to.

Presumably the argument would not he that it was a Taliban Hospital, but that it was being used by the Taliban as a non-hospital for purposes of launching attacks. If the latter is true, it's not necessarily a war crime with out further analysis, but that doesn't mean the US is in the clear, because there's still the proportionality analysis -- you have to show that the military necessity of the attack was sufficiently great to justify the fact that you knew that you were hitting a working hospital (that was also being used for other purposes). I'd certainly say that the attack looks disproportionate and thus like a war crime, but, assuming the US military did genuinely think that the hospital was being used to plan military attacks, there's some wiggle room there.

*no consequences for Americans
*any alleged crime, had one occurred, ended as soon as it was over
* policies have been revised since the time of the alleged act
*look forwards, don't dredge up unpleasantnesses from the past

I don't know, but if they didn't (and knew it was a functioning hospital) it was obviously a war crime per se, so it seems pretty unlikely that anyone would have either requested or approved the targeting.

8/17: the article is unclear (since the facts are still being gathered) but makes is sound as if the rationale was that the hospital was thought to be primarily/possibly exclusively treating taliban forces. The army didn't want those forces to receive medical treatment and then return to the battlefield. The War on Terror does not operate according to the Geneva Conventions.

22 appears to have been written by someone entirely unfamiliar with any history regarding the United States and how it behaves in wars or what it calls something else but are wars or what are wars but it claims it's not part of them even though it clearly is.

I don't think it's ever been official US policy that bombing Taliban hospitals is OK just because they're treating the Taliban, and I believe that knowingly targeting such a hospital for that reason would lead to prosecution under the UCMJ, as well as being a war crime under international law. I'm not an expert in this area, though -- has there ever been an official indication to the contrary?

Not an expert either, but I also haven't heard of any such hospital-related exception to the Geneva Conventions because Terror. Not that it sounds impossible that we might have taken such a position, but I don't recall it.

I'm fairly certain that 24 was more descriptive than 'is legally understood to be', despite the various Bush era attempts to create new categories of people they could actually kidnap and torture. What 24 describes sounds like the most plausible explanation to me.

What I found interesting (Empire bombs civilians at whim and will is not) were the phone calls to Washington while the bombing was going on. If we all are really that connected now, there is an element of in-your-face to this event. Maybe somebody pissed at or warning MSF.

The other thing that crossed my mind as I was reading about was that these people, to an extent we are not going to get from umpteen miles away and news reports, these people knew each other, perhaps only knew of, but after thirteen years, I am betting have spoken to and about each other. Doctors, US officers, "taliban" local gang militia leader.

Switching "Afghan Army" for "disgruntled green berets and possibly CIA" doesn't require too much more cynicism, I think. Whether or not we see a real investigation (which I also doubt) we'll definitely never see war crimes charges, unless somehow the US's security counsel veto disappears or the ambassador to the UN suddenly goes rogue in a way no one in the US but everyone outside of it saw coming.

Hospitals (like ambulances and medics) are protected, but lose their protected status as soon as they start being used as anything other than a hospital (storing ammunition, firing position, command post etc). After that the only constraint on attacking them is proportionality and the presence of protected non-combatants. Using a hospital as anything other than a hospital is a war crime for this reason - comes under the heading of 'perfidy', like misuse of a flag of surrender or dressing your troops in civilian clothes without a clearly visible recognition mark, because all of those tend to endanger non-combatants.

So 'functioning hospital' doesn't protect it per se. What protects it is 'functioning hospital and nothing else'. If there's other stuff going on, then it's just essentially 'building containing some enemy targets and some non-combatants' and that's not necessarily protected - it depends on proportionality. Levelling a functioning major hospital because there was a sniper in one window wouldn't be proportionate, but if there was a clinic with a battalion CP in it you could probably go ahead, even if it meant killing a handful of civilian doctors and patients.

48: precedent and judgement, I would assume, just like any other court. The US-Afghan SPA immunises US troops from prosecution in Afghanistan, and I am not sure whether that extends to prosecution in the ICC (Afghanistan is a member) - an ICC prosecution without support from the nation in which the crime took place would be very difficult.

They could always base their defence on cultural sensitivity: deliberately mutilating and killing enemy wounded is a core Afghan cultural practice, and it would be grossly insensitive to try to impose foreign values on this proud and independent civilisation.

I don't know what the legal position is around negligence in this area - it strikes me that it's going to be tricky to prove intent, but might be easier to show that they didn't take reasonable precautions not to hit protected sites. But I don't know if that still counts as a war crime or not.

I love that the rationalization for the attack appears to be that they suspected an ISI operative was in the hospital directing Taliban attacks. It's a perfect encapsulation of why Afghanistan is a hopeless case.

56: one of about eight successive rationalisations so far, to be exact... but, yes. The Pakistanis are never going away because they're never not going to be next door to Afghanistan, and the Saudis are never going to stop backing them because their armed forces would be a broken reed without Pakistani mercenaries, and then they wouldn't be able to bomb and shell nearly as many Shia as they would like to.

I knew they did it some times. Refreshing my memory with the Wikipedia page for the Grand Mosque seizure, I see that it says that they used French commandos, probably with Pakistani soldiers doing the actual operation. I think what I read before only mentioned the French. I suppose it's the kind of thing you try to keep quiet.

Proportionality and the presence of non-combatants is why hospitals have protected status: saying that they lose it and those separate critieria replace it in some cases is bonkers. Using a hospital as something else is a violation for just that reason as well. And the fact that someone is using it that way is very explicitly not something allowed as a reason when evaluating proportionality. As a result, yes, "functioning hospital" protects the hell out of it.

Also "proportionality" doesn't mean "we'll also get some enemy guys" and it doesn't even mean "there are more enemy guys in there than civilians". So the Command Post example doesn't even necessarily apply.

Also the fact that Afghanistan promised to never complain about US war crimes really goes neither here nor there: the ICC can't prosecute without approval from the UN and the US has automatic veto power and even if that wasn't the case the US isn't a party to the ICC. (The Obama administration has been friendlier to it than, say, the "war crimes are a healthy and fun way to get your exercise for the day" style Bush administration, but that doesn't mean we've signed on to it. I mean, we have laws explicitly protecting US soldiers from prosecution right up to permitting military action if they're in custody.)

Also the rationale described in 56, which really does seem to be what they're going with for the most part*, is something that would definitely never count as ok because having one or more enemy soldiers inside it is pretty much what it means for a hospital to be neutral in a conflict.

I mean, the article itself notes that even if there was gunfire literally coming out of the hospital windows aimed at the green beret commander - which I think the article is pretty clear is almost certainly a bunch of hogwash - that wouldn't qualify it as a target because they could have backed off and been out of danger. And even if they couldn't an hour long series of air strikes is pretty much the least acceptable response to it because proportionality doesn't just apply to civilians it applies to civilian structures, so the building itself counted against proportionality (and very, very much so given that it was a hospital).

*Plus some innuendo about "which may mean it's the entire command post for the region and full of weapons and under the military control of the Taliban never you mind what anyone there in the hospital is saying.

The rules of engagement might say they are supposed to back up rather than shoot the hospital, but that's an optional rule, not like the rule about not shooting at hospitals that aren't being used for combat.

Afghanistan is a hopeless case because it's a cartoonishly lawless shithole that sounds like someone created in a fictional story to justify colonization. The two main choices for governance in the last couple decades are a bunch of religious nutjobs who might chop off the ends of your wife's fingers for wearing nail polish or a bunch of warlords whose ranks are filled with commanders who are big fans of chaining doe eyed male children to their beds for a nightly sodomy marathon.

Yeah that sounds badass and all but it's still a violation of international law because the entire point is to protect civilians, not to make things easier on the armed forces. Oh, and if the hospital was undefended, which it blatantly was, any kind of bombardment is a violation too.

Look, to make this not a direct and really obvious war crime you need to invent a really magnificent set of counterfactuals and ones incompatible with half the stuff we actually do know about the case. I mean, just what the US alone is willing to grant about what happens is equivalent to them granting that it was a war crime.

Are you putting civilians or other non-combatants at risk by shooting at a functioning hospital?

Is killing* those people a matter of necessity and do the military advantages outweigh the risks involved?

Shooting back at someone firing from a position where shooting back at them presents a serious risk to civilians when there isn't a very, very, very good justification for doing so (and, yes, "we might have to back off a block or so" is not one of those). This is the point of making human shields a violation as well.

Look, again, international law is not primarily about making armies play fair with each other. It does do that. But the point is protecting non-combatants.

Also we may not know for sure if they were shooting out the windows of the hospital at people, even though the only people to kind of imply this under conditions of anonymity to the press were the people who called in asking for the air strike and not, say, anyone in the actual (functioning) hospital itself. But even if they were leveling the thing with repeated air strikes is very, very much a violation of international law and a very serious one to boot.

The original story floated by the US was that there was one dude they really wanted to kill in the hospital. I have no idea what the current story is, but given that they haven't even bothered to make up anything like "there was a Taliban unit in there" or "it was a munitions depot," I feel pretty confident that in this case, theory aside, we have a war crime.

The point is a reasonably reciprocal set of norms. While I agree that there are responses that are so disproportionate as to be wrong, as a general rule, I don't see how creating a situation where somebody can shoot at you and you can't shoot back because of international law does anything but undermine international law. The reason people don't use human shields often (which, again, I'm not saying was the case here as I don't know) isn't because it is against international law, but because it just gets you shot anyway.

Yeah that's fascinating Moby and yet somehow the Geneva conventions disagree pretty fucking explicitly about that particular question. The reason, which I think is pretty obvious, is that if "they broke the rules first" gets you out of having to follow the Geneva Conventions then no one actually bothers to obey the Geneva Conventions.

See, for example, Article 51:

Art 51. - Protection of the civilian population

1. The civilian population and individual civilians shall enjoy general protection against dangers arising from military operations. To give effect to this protection, the following rules, which are additional to other applicable rules of international law, shall be observed in all circumstances.

2. The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited.

3. Civilians shall enjoy the protection afforded by this section, unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities.

4. Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited. Indiscriminate attacks are:

(a) those which are not directed at a specific military objective;

(b) those which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; or

(c) those which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by this Protocol;

and consequently, in each such case, are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction.

5. Among others, the following types of attacks are to be considered as indiscriminate:

(a) an attack by bombardment by any methods or means which treats as a single military objective a number of clearly separated and distinct military objectives located in a city, town, village or other area containing a similar concentration of civilians or civilian objects;

and(b) an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.

6. Attacks against the civilian population or civilians by way of reprisals are prohibited.

7. The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations. The Parties to the conflict shall not direct the movement of the civilian population or individual civilians in order to attempt to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield military operations.

8. Any violation of these prohibitions shall not release the Parties to the conflict from their legal obligations with respect to the civilian population and civilians, including the obligation to take the precautionary measures provided for in Article 57.

And in case you were wondering what those obligations in Article 57 were the answer is that, yes, they were things the US absolutely did not do.

Art 57. Precautions in attack

1. In the conduct of military operations, constant care shall be taken to spare the civilian population, civilians and civilian objects.

2. With respect to attacks, the following precautions shall be taken:

(a) those who plan or decide upon an attack shall:

(i) do everything feasible to verify that the objectives to be attacked are neither civilians nor civilian objects and are not subject to special protection but are military objectives within the meaning of paragraph 2 of Article 52 and that it is not prohibited by the provisions of this Protocol to attack them;

(ii) take all feasible precautions in the choice of means and methods of attack with a view to avoiding, and in any event to minimizing, incidental loss or civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects;

(iii) refrain from deciding to launch any attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated;

(b) an attack shall be cancelled or suspended if it becomes apparent that the objective is not a military one or is subject to special protection or that the attack may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated;

(c) effective advance warning shall be given of attacks which may affect the civilian population, unless circumstances do not permit.

If you read that strictly, and I agree that it would be a better world if people did, basically everything the United States does with its military is a war crime. But, "feasible precautions" and "excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated" are fairly flexible concepts.

Proportionality and the presence of non-combatants is why hospitals have protected status: saying that they lose it and those separate critieria replace it in some cases is bonkers.

No, medical personnel and medical facilities have a very specific sort of protected status, denoted by a specific set of markings (for example, the Red Cross or Red Crescent) that other civilian buildings don't have. They're singled out for special mention in the relevant treaties.

Also the fact that Afghanistan promised to never complain about US war crimes really goes neither here nor there: the ICC can't prosecute without approval from the UN and the US has automatic veto power and even if that wasn't the case the US isn't a party to the ICC.

There are three ways in which the ICC can investigate and prosecute:
-- a referral from an ICC member state
-- a referral from the UNSC
-- on the authorisation of its own pre-trial chamber.

The UN doesn't have to approve ICC prosecutions, in fact the treaty of Rome specifically forbids it from doing so.

Is that why all those econ bloggers have been tweeting recently about how the Red Cross is the worst charity you could possibly donate to? Has the Red Cross's special status in the eyes of government become an example of regulatory capture or rent-seeking or one of those words?

76.1 is, I think, a misreading of what Moby was trying to say. There is generally not an "unless the other guy does it first" caveat to your duty to obey the laws of armed conflict. (With one exception, of course, which MHPH will be able to explain to us.)

Moby is correct that the Geneva Conventions are vague; they're meant to be vague, they're meant to be general principles that can be drawn up in an age of horse cavalry with sabres and still be relevant in an age of flying robots. In particular, the definition of a military objective is extremely broad: "those objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage."

The only things you aren't allowed to hit are things that don't fall into that category.

And, no, there is no obligation to retreat rather than attack a military objective if doing so might endanger civilian life. Of course there isn't. The article is wrong.

82: sorry, by "a specific set of markings (for example, the Red Cross or Red Crescent)" I literally just meant a cross or crescent coloured red painted on the roof or wherever. Needn't have anything to do with the ICRC. Army medics could wear a red cross armband, for example, without having to have any association with the Red Cross movement.

The ICRC and the various national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies are separate organisations, but allied. The ICRC takes care of conflict-related stuff internationally, the national Red Cross societies do first aid and disaster relief in their home countries.

And, no, there is no obligation to retreat rather than attack a military objective if doing so might endanger civilian life.

Isn't there if the danger to civilian life would be disproportionate to the value of the military objective? There might not be an absolute obligation to retreat under those circumstances, but there's a general obligation not to endanger civilians disproportionately.

85: well, in that case there's an obligation not to attack, because of proportionality. But that's a different question. The article implied (I think because the author had a hazy memory of the debate over US stand-your-ground laws) that if you come under attack and to return fire would endanger civilian life, then you have the obligation to retreat to safer ground if possible. This isn't the case.

But are you saying that proportionality doesn't have to even be considered if you're returning fire rather than attacking 'unprovoked', or just that the obligation not to return fire if it would endanger civilian life isn't absolute? Without looking it up, my guess is that proportionality is still a necessary consideration even if you are returning fire, but if you point me to something that says it isn't, I'd be interested.

The thing I don't understand is that MSF has said repeatedly that they called both the US and Afghan governments repeatedly during the bombing to say they were hitting a hospital, and they still wouldn't stop. That seems highly problematic, to say the least.

My thought is that the subjective assessment of proportion on the part of the person being shot at (or their superiors) is going to be given preponderant weight in nearly every case and that this is especially likely to be true when only one side is capable of projecting force at much of a distance and the person being shot at is on that side.

90 seems like the least surprising part of this. I'm not surprised that there's more than hour's worth of latency between whoever MSF was able to call and the actual military personnel in control of the live operation. Maybe there would be less than hour of latency from the President to those personnel, say, but it would take most of that time to get up to that level if it could be done at all.

My understanding (and no the international law of war doesn't come up often in my day to day legal practice) is that proportinality is always required when there are civilians involved but that doesn't involve a duty to retreat. Or, I think everyone is saying the same thing. And, of course, proportionality is one of those words subject to lawyering, but I believe it has to at least be taken into consideration (ie, it's not a war crime if you genuinely and at least semi-plausibly think the nominal "hospital" is being used as the general HQ for your enemy army and you're completely wrong; it is a crime if you say "don't know, don't care, could be" to the question "is the thing marked as a hospital really being used as an enemy HQ" and bomb it anyway. And there are shades of gray and factual questions about intent. My understanding is that the US Military, just like any big organization that is advised by defense lawyers, has protocols to document that the targeting of civilians at least jumps through these nominal hoops so as to have plausible records and arguments against the commission of war crimes, even though (like any big organization dealing with regulation it finds burdensome) these are designed to permit as much "flexibility" (ie, noncompliance) as possible while still staying within the strict bounds of legality.

Even assuming that they were being fired on (which is at best vaguely ambiguously suggested by anonymous sources) no one has given any argument that they definitely had to be on that street and that moving one over would have compromised any significant* military objectives. In that case, yeah, they had a duty not to return fire and if not returning fire put them at danger and they could back off out of danger they had no justification overriding that duty. They didn't have a duty to retreat because they could have stood there and gotten shot at (again, assuming etc.), but that's as close as it gets. (And that's what the article points out: the people in question weren't trapped and had reasonable options to protect themselves and advance their military objectives that didn't involve shooting at a hospital, like, walking a block over.)

Also no, they really don't have a special status above and beyond the one extended to civilians and civilian structures that's abandoned when people start firing out of protected hospitals/mounting operations out of functioning ones/etc and then it's a question of proportionality. This is pretty obvious if you note that the entire justification for the supposed abandonment of that protected status in this case would be in terms of proportionality. The designation stuff is because they're considered especially important and because there are some specific rules for military hospitals/medics/etc, of which there are lots. (You don't see them talking about, for example, kindergarten schools separately, but if there were specific military kindergarteners run by the armed forces then you absolutely would.) But this was not even remotely close to anything like that.

91: I think that's where the analogy to 'stand your ground' comes in. Being very lax about an off-the-cuff assessment of proportionality by someone who's being shot at and has no means of protecting themselves other than returning fire is one thing, that I can sympathize with. When the option of safe retreat is there, then I think it's reasonable to expect it to be used at least enough to properly evaluate the proportionality of response.

(Also, just to keep track, we still don't have a clear claim from anyone on the scene that there was gunfire coming from the hospital, right? We're just speculating about what an excuse might be? Or is there a direct claim from someone with knowledge that the hospital was a proper military target?)

Even assuming that they were being fired on (which is at best vaguely ambiguously suggested by anonymous sources) no one has given any argument that they definitely had to be on that street and that moving one over would have compromised any significant* military objectives.

But, if they were being fired on (which, I'm assuming only for this argument), wouldn't it work the other way? That is, you (the ICC or whatever) would have to show that they didn't have a significant military objective being where they were. And also, I think you'd have to show that moving to another location was as safe as shooting back because it's going to be really hard to argue that a guy didn't think his personal self not getting killed wasn't proportional. I think it would be very hard to establish either of those things even if we assume witnesses who are trusted to be neutral and who had somehow managed to see the whole thing.

It's proportionality in light of military objectives, which, generally, are to advance, not retreat, and to kill your enemies. If you're fired on by a single sniper it's probably not OK to destroy a whole hospital. If the hospital is full of snipers and is killing your men so you can't attack and take the city that's your military objective, you don't have to retreat out of the city just because the snipers are firing from a hospital.* Where on that spectrum this particular case falls is something we don't know yet, though it certainly seems more like the former than the latter.

*worth remembering that these laws were put together by the same nations that eg bombed Hamburg and Dresden and Hiroshima.

I'm not sure what level of fire these hypothetical guys could be taking that would justify shelling a hospital with an AC-130 for an hour. Maybe if the enemy were firing recoilless rifles en masse and they were standing in front of a second, children's, hospital.

Where on that spectrum this particular case falls is something we don't know yet, though it certainly seems more like the former than the latter.

And just to be clear, we don't know that this case falls on that spectrum at all -- we don't know that any fire was coming from the hospital. Our basis for believing there was fire coming from the hospital at this point is, as far as I can tell, "There must have been fire coming from the hospital, otherwise it would have been a war crime." We don't know that there wasn't, but we really don't know that there was.

It's a little bit stronger than that, but MSF says there was no shooting.

A senior Green Beret officer has told superiors that his troops, accompanying Afghan security forces, were under fire and in danger, according to a former government official familiar with his account.

I'm quibbling, but that quote from the story doesn't claim that the troops were under fire from the hospital, just that they were under fire generally. At which point I'm dismissing it as anything significant, until someone comes forward with something a little more clearly stated.

89: Without looking it up, my guess is that proportionality is still a necessary consideration even if you are returning fire

That is correct.

92: yes. The thing to remember about all these "the US military knew it was a hospital and therefore it must have been deliberate" arguments is that the US military (like others) has actually bombed its own troops on a number of occasions, even though "the US military" by definition knows that its troops are US troops. The conclusion is not that it bombed its own troops deliberately, but that talking about "the US military" as though it were a single entity is not very sensible at any time and especially not in situations like this.

98: Benefit of the doubt typically goes straight to the "not killing a bunch of civilians and/or blowing up a hospital" position though (because that is the point of the thing). They'd need to do a whole lot more than just assert "no it was totally necessary I dare you to prove otherwise", especially given the case involved, their ability to get out of trouble and so on.

But really the point in 104 is right: nothing they've even hinted at comes anywhere near enough to justify straight up flattening the hospital with an hour long aerial bombardment. The best case scenario here, even granting them things that are, to be charitable, unlikely would only get out within arguable distance of "returning fire carefully at the places where the gunfire is coming (and not generally at the building/compound" and/or "going into the compound and trying to find the forces responsible with the understand that gunfire might result".

nothing they've even hinted at comes anywhere near enough to justify straight up flattening the hospital with an hour long aerial bombardment.

According to the Afghan authorities it was a defended position which was putting fire on Afghan troops, and was also the local HQ for Taliban operations.

"returning fire carefully at the places where the gunfire is coming (and not generally at the building/compound" and/or "going into the compound and trying to find the forces responsible with the understand that gunfire might result".

Do you actually know what that would have involved? Assaulting into an enormous building full of enemy dressed as civilians, and civilians dressed as civilians, at night? You know the force ratio for assaulting into a building, right?

I'm guessing "as recently as 9 October" in an article written on the 21st and followed immediately by multiple oh-like-hell-it-was witness accounts is kind of a giveaway as far as how credible the reporter thinks the guy was being. But that's still a heard-from-someone-who-heard-from-someone account unless he was there watching it happen, so it's not really any better than the person who heard from the green beret guy.

92: I'm willing to believe the time delay as well, but it's worth noting all the same that MSF wasn't just calling around randomly - they had a specific, pre-established communication channel to both Washington and Kabul that they were using. So it probably wouldn't have been a delay in getting ahold of someone as much as a delay in whatever the people they told did having an impact on what was going on.

And, I mean, if 115 is an accurate description of what the Afghan authorities are saying even the United States accounts are saying they're full of it, let alone the people who were actually there (and the evidence in the aftermath). And if it was a heavily defended compound serving as their HQ then it wouldn't really be full of civilians in the first place which makes that sound a lot less impressive. I mean, just adding in that there are lots of civilians in it is directly undercutting the claim that it was their base of operations - especially since the bit that was bombed was the operating theater/emergency room/etc. part and not just outlying bits of the compound where people could hole up without getting in the way of everyone.

if it was a heavily defended compound serving as their HQ then it wouldn't really be full of civilians in the first place

Why not? You sound like you're imagining something like SHAPE but it would more likely be a few Talib coming in and taking over part of the compound. (They have form for this sort of thing, after all. They've used schools and mosques and clinics.)

not just outlying bits of the compound where people could hole up without getting in the way of everyone.

120.2: Well sure but then when you do it that way it goes back to not being an allowed target because there's only a handful of guys in a large compound containing a functioning hospital (which was the thing that got bombed).

No, no, ajay's completely right: Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out. No reason to stop at Afghanistan -- bomb everyone back to the Stone Age. Bring the war home! One, two, a thousand Vietnams! Kill every man and every baby, every grandmother and great-grandfather. Kill every cat and dog and horse and ferret. Kill all the fish and the whales too. Are you afraid of ruins? Why? Total abnegation is total liberation. A billion firestorms consuming the cities and forests and fields. Not one stone left on top of another. A parking lot paved with luscious black glass, stretching 10,000 miles in any direction. Nuclear winter for one million years. Then we'll have Freedom and Liberty and the Pursuit of Wealthiness!

|| In easier to parse military matters: we can all agree that the Chinese offense at a US military ship passing within 12 miles of their base in the Spratlys is ridiculous, unfounded, and hypocritical, right?|>

It's weird to think that my friend from high school is now the parent of someone born in Taiwan. Last guy you would have expected it of back then. But then, your horizons are a lot smaller when you're that young.

They could always base their defence on cultural sensitivity: deliberately mutilating and killing enemy wounded is a core Afghan cultural practice, and it would be grossly insensitive to try to impose foreign values on this proud and independent civilisation.

as the RAF intelligence officer John Glubb--later "Glubb Pasha" of the Arab Legion--put it, "Life in the desert is a continuous guerilla warfare." You also had to strike hard and fast in Arabia because that was the way of "Bedouin war."91 To Bedouin, war was a "romantic excitement" whose production of "tragedies, bereavements, widows and orphans" was a "normal way of life," "natural and inevitable." Their taste for war was the source of their belief that they were "elites of the human race." It would almost be a cultural offense not to bombard them with all the might of the empire.92 Wilson confirmed for the Air Ministry that the problem was one of public perception, that Iraqis were used to a state of constant warfare, expected justice without kid gloves, had no patience with sentimental distinctions between combatants and noncombatants, and viewed air action as entirely "legitimate and proper." "The natives of a lot of these tribes love fighting for fighting's sake," Trenchard assured Parliament. "They have no objection to being killed."

I think everyone has at least one objection to being killed. even suicidal people facing a friendly woman in white with a helpful series of needles on a stainless-steel tray that starts with clear liquid morphine and then the last of the six looks like it's full of tar and has a skull and crossbones in ground glass on it, a palette for fade to black. not "no" objection. like, maybe, they haven't eaten a favorite food recently enough? I would definitely feel bad if I were slated to die and I hadn't had any boiled peanuts, watermelon and sweet tea for a year. or mebbe sworn a blood-oath for terrible vengeance?

only a man could consider the creation of war-orphaned children and picturesquely suffering widows a net good on aesthetic grounds (the view is being imputed by a self-serving man to other men without widows intermediating the view I would say.) "they have no objection to being killed," is so insane it is almost charming. a fevered pitch for understanding the other as something that quite likes being ground under foot, really!

on the othered hand it is interesting to try to imagine what it would be like to live in a society that had constant war and violence as a crucial part of its self-conception though? could you convince yourself via a series of tragedies and atrocities that you were tempered steel, and scoff at red-faced, fat city-dwellers? this would never be a good reason to kill people--that they thought they were warriors--but it is fascinating.

everything I've ever heard about afghanistan has made me not want to go there. (I'd ever like to go hypothetically to do a full silk-road overland trip by motorcycle. ok, maybe a jeep, I'm old now). well, unless I get to stipulate I'm a dude and I get one of those 'we were about to kill you like a dog in the street--but now that you saved that foal we thought lost in the ravine, we consider you a brotherwhom we would defend to the ends of the earth, even if the last man of our village must perish in the trying'-style welcomes so many allege to have gotten over the years.

reading the stories about US servicemen ordered to condone child rape was rough on the stomach. my father's tales to me of ye olden-tymes afghainstane (garnered solely from reading old british histories and, to be fair to him, so bracketed) when I was young and already planning various journeys on our globes and atlases boiled down to, 'at night, after the battle, the women will come with long knives to strip the bodies for gear. if they're feeling merciful they'll slit your throat!'

maybe they're simply the brokest-ass, invaded-est nation in the world right now, along with yemen (less-formally-invaded, but a rain of bombs is unfriendly)? colonizing missions are doomed to fail and have twisted motivations, but I still would feel that the US was wronging afghani women were we to take off and the taliban roar right back into power. even the stories now of how we're failing the families of translators from the iraq and the previous iterations of our war on afghanistan are sickening. it makes you want to give waaay more people visas and let everybody run away to a better country from their current, shitty country. the potential "blowback" when one of 100,000 people turned out to be a terrorist makes no politician want to do this ever, but handing out tickets to the states would be a better use of our money than artisanally curated drone-stikes.

My understanding is that Afghanistan, like Italy in Metternich's day, is a geographical expression. The idea that there should be a single state administering it was a product of British and Russian thinking in the Great Game; unlike the Italian, the Afghans have never really bought into it, except for the minority whose private interests are served by doing so.

This isn't to criticise the Afghans, at least on that score. Logically, why should that region of central Asia be administered by a single state?

140.3 is right on all counts. 100 years ago western countries had near enough open borders and all kinds of people who would be defined as terrorists now were in and out all the time. People thought it was the price of liberty, while obviously hanging anybody who actually got caught setting off an infernal device.

The problem now is that the west has no credibility in most of Asia. If an American President or European leader wrote to the Taliban stating honestly that they had no intention of engaging in any more imperialist wars, the Taliban flat out wouldn't believe it. For good reason

My understanding is that Afghanistan, like Italy in Metternich's day, is a geographical expression. The idea that there should be a single state administering it was a product of British and Russian thinking in the Great Game; unlike the Italian, the Afghans have never really bought into it, except for the minority whose private interests are served by doing so.

This is not actually the case, and it's very interesting and odd that it isn't. Afghanistan has existed as a state since the early 18th century (the Durrani Empire), decades before the British and Russians got anywhere near it, and in its current borders since the early 19th, and to my knowledge, even though the place is racially, linguistically, culturally and even religiously all over the place, and has been historically dominated by one subclan of one particular ethnic group (the Durrani Pashtuns) for most of its existence, there has never been any strong separatist movement in any part of it, and they seem to think of themselves as Afghans as well as being Yusufzai Pashtuns or Hazara or whatever. The Northern Alliance were different from the Northern League.

I would suspect this is because the central government in Afghanistan has generally tended to leave the Afghan people alone more or less (unlike what they did to the Iranians, Punjabis, Sindhis, Sikhs, etc etc), so there's nothing to push back against. And there's generally been an external threat of some kind - which is always a help when it comes to statebuilding.

Most of medieval Afghanistan was part of the Persianate cultural complex. It's as hard to believe as miniskirts in Kabul in the 60s but much of Afghanistan was home to some of the most sophisticated human cultural and scientific activity of its day. Avicenna was born in Balkh, as were great poets Rumi and Nasir Khusraw, among many others. The poets Jami and Ansari were both from Herat, as was the great philosopher and theologian Fakhr Din al-Razi. And there are dozens of other such names, great poets, philosophers, scholars, polymaths, from all over the territory comprising modern day Afghanistan. In more recent times one of the greatest non-violent independence activists of the 20th century was the Pashtun Abdul Ghaffar Khan. I've long wished he were much better known. He had an enormous influence on Gandhi and the two were very close, his movement of "Red Shirts" numbered over 100,000 strong (and I've seen plausible numbers that count 2 or 3 times that many) and most of them Pashtuns. And he grounded his non-violent principles firmly in the Qur'an and the Sunna. I know it's hard to believe there were 100,000+ Pashtun adherents of a religiously grounded Islamic activist political movement with non-violent civil disobedience as one of its chief principles but there you go. The past is always a stranger place than we think.

And, yeah, I've always wanted to go there.
--

A good friend of mine spent about 8 years living there and in the NW Frontier province of Pakistan in the late 60s and early 70s and speaks fluent Pashto. He's got some truly amazing harrowing stories, many of them of the Hatfields and McCoys variety.

OK, that seems right. I had thought the Durrani empire was more ephemeral.

Multiple ethnicities, leading to multiple loyalties, is probably the norm in any complex society. I have multiple conflicting ethnicities myself - I carry a British passport, but you people (ajay) can go fuck yourselves when it comes to the Rugby. The question is, which you regard as your principal ethnicity, and is it the same one under all conditions?

The problem for the Taliban is, as I understand it, that the Tajiks and Hazara etc, regard them as a Pashtun movement, whereas they don't tend to respect the other ethnicities because they see them as subordinate to their version of Islam. This is a recipe for war without end whether the westerners stay involved or not.

147 One of my favorite stories of his was about a friend of his who had left Afghanistan for many years, lived and studied in Germany, IIRC for a PhD in something or other, he spoke about ten languages and had thousands of lines of poetry in about a half a dozen of them committed to memory, including Goethe, Dante, Hafez, etc. A really cultured dude. My friend was staying at this guy's family compound, they're sitting around in the courtyard and when it got late this guy tells my friend that he's going to go sleep with the rest of his family in the tower, and he walks over to a chest and pulls out an old revolver that he puts on the table in front of my friend and tells him that if anyone comes over the wall, shoot them.

147: see, stories like that are why I'm quite glad it didn't work out with me and the Yusufzai woman I was dating a few years ago. Nice lady, but visits to the inlaws in their hilltop mansion could have been tense.

Going home with a woman from a traditional family in Mongolia would also be intense.

This interests me because I knew a guy who used to visit Mongolia to drum up students for his university, and one time one of the admin people at the University of Ulaabaatar where he was staying invited him to spend the weekend at her parents' ger in the country. So they went, and everybody was very friendly and showed him round and communicated as best they could. There was no suggestion of anything untoward happening, and on Sunday night they drove back to the city and a few days later he flew home.

I love Greco-Bactria, easternmost bastion of Hellenic civilization. They controlled what is now northern Afghanistan, at times extending well into Iran and Pakistan.

They started out straight up Greek, leaving gymnasia and statues of Heracles et al, but eventually they became the first to make physical representations of the Buddha. Loads of the images and statues of the Buddha you see today are recognizable descendants of the Hellenistic statues the Greco-Bactrians or their descendant states made around the birth of Christ. You can see it at the Met if they haven't shoved it back down into their vault.

My grad school has a "partnership" with an Central Asian university where similar students come over for a week or two and sit in on classes and visit and do events and so forth. It was pretty awkward for me because many of the students are on a break from government service and the country is autocratic (though more sedately so than some there) - not something one easily broaches.

143, 144 and 161 get it right. My parents lived in the miniskirt-wearing Kabul of the early 70s and it was a reasonably sophisticated, modernizing place, though 20 miles into the countryside it was of course a whole different story. The King was (like the Cambodian king) a too-crafty-for-his-own-good splitter in the Cold War -- the road in the Northern half of Afghanistan was built by the Soviets, the one in the South by the Americans. Somewhat similarly to Cambodia, the delicate balance of the state, which wasn't just a product of colonialism but was deeply tied up in it, collapsed under cold war pressure. Eventually the Russians invaded and then we decided to arm crazies to the hilt and work with ultra dubious folks in Pakistan to fight the Russians and here we are today. I think "the US and the Soviets fucked things up completely" is much closer to the truth than "Afghanistan -- land of eternally murderous primitives."

They also lived in early 70s Tehran for a few months on the same trip and traveled around Iran. My Mom kinda sorta looks Persian. She says that occasionally a crazy-seeming person would come up and start berating her for being with a Western man, but then other people would always intervene and explain (ironically, only my Dad had enough Farsi to communicate) how embarassed they were and how those kinds of crazy people weren't the true Iran, etc.

I think "the US and the Soviets fucked things up completely" is much closer to the truth than "Afghanistan -- land of eternally murderous primitives."

Totally this, and thank you for saying it because I was fumbling over how on earth to respond. I had a number of Afghan friends in college who had emigrated at a young age or whose parents had come here before they were born and they were less obviously scarred by war than my Bosnian friends who'd lived through one recently but that was a dynamic there. They were also clearly connected to a vibrant, affirming, really cool culture. At the time, I thought it was somewhere I'd like to travel if I ever got the opportunity but now it's hard to imagine it being safe enough. And in large part that's on us Americans, I think.

The Saudis deserve considerable blame as well. I guess it's not surprising, but it's weird how people now think of radical Islam as the eternal state of Islamic countries, rather than a new development that is both a result of and a response to outsider actors. Women wearing head coverings in 60s Cairo was pretty rare, for example, though it's almost universal now.

That's something I remember from The Thistle and the Drone, that tribal cultures in Afghanistan, Yemen, etc. often have a lot of traditional practices that are quite distinct from sharia / Quran-based, but they have some workaround story that their clan ancestors had a direct line to Muhammad or something.

Down there, since you bring up the Yemen strike, it is mentioned that Medecins sans Frontieres strongly opposes the pharmaceutical provisions of Obama's TPP, and is lobbying very hard against it.

It is also made clear in the comments that the strike on the hospital in Kunduz would have to pre-cleared, and recleared at a very very level of the chain of command. The aircraft pilots repeatedly asked, because they knew exactly what they were hitting, and knew shit would be directed their way. 1/2 hour in, Generals knew the hospital was being hit, and did not stop it.

In recent years, the organization has tried to use its influence to urge the drug maker Novartis to drop its case against India's patent law that prevents Novartis from patenting its drugs in India. A few years earlier, Novartis also sued South Africa to prevent it from importing cheaper AIDS drugs. While MSF is generally impartial, the statements by MSF representatives suggest they are taking a somewhat political position. Dr. Tido von Schoen-Angerer, director of DWB's Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines, says, "Just like five years ago, Novartis, with its legal actions, is trying to stand in the way of people's right to access the medicines they need."[108] MSF launched a petition drive on its website to make Novartis drop the case.

(Novartis lost)

And as the TPP heads for the homestretch, MSF starts getting bombed and killed.

This is not something a General would do on his own. Barry Lime-Obama will get his checks in two years.

As a rule, interesting how it goes, Pat Lang tries to protect the military but even more intelligence agencies, is respectful and cautious about the President, but attacks the State Dept in fairly sexist language. Sam Power et al.

god, the saudis are such massive, massive dicks. I know one person who went and worked for...more neutrally stayed and had sex with?...some stupid prince for $30,000 for a single month in the 1990s (natural blonde ftw!), and I also know some people in indonesia who have had their (muslim) family cemetery razed quite recently (I mean, a cemetery with their family as well as many others buried in it). it was a condition of their town getting a shiny new mosque built with sweet wahhabi $$$ that they destroy their 'idolatrous' graveyard. they have whole festive days where you go pour rose-scented water on the headstones! you leave your dead relatives food, even, like ketupat (those woven banana-leaf packets with rice/other stuff inside), before aidilfitri. straits chinese people, malays, filipino peeps etc. all do the same thing, at various times of year. "see that my grave is kept clean," as the songs say.

the saudis want to erase every variant form of islam and destroy all hybrid celebrations that include local pre-conversion practices. fuuuuuck theeeemmm, and not with a fucksaw; they might like it. I have legit wanted to brain some assholes walking through the qatar airport, cute 13-year-old boy with pinchable cheeks sauntering at the front of the procession in a shining white dishdash and keffiyeh, dad close behind in sunglasses (why, always with the sunglasses), very little girls uncovered and then all the daughters above nine or so veiled, with mom bringing up the rear with a niqab on. I honestly feel like someone is walking around with a slave. it's not my place to tell any muslim woman how she should dress, and if a person were in a position to freely choose her clothing she should choose whatever she wished. I can still think her husband is a dick and her society is denying her basic human rights, though. my plot to force the duggar daughters to dress sluttier may have ethical problems too, but probably not.

Nothing truer than 181. I wouldn't say that traditional Muslim graveyards are even in my top ten favourite places but they still look nice. Everywhere you go in the Muslim world you see nice old mosques in (admittedly) various states of disrepair and in a bewildering variety of styles, and then there's always some enormous identikit white-tiled twin-minaret excresence of a McMosque looming overhead and earnest little troops of rice-Wahhabis trudging in and out.

One time, a place I worked was forced for political reasons to accept a Saudi prince as an intern, in violation of various rather stringent HR practices about who was qualified to be an intern, and taking up a coveted spot that would have gone to someone else. The prince never actually showed up to take the position; I heard it was because he was unhappy upon hearing that he would be expected to do the same type of fairly menial work that the other interns do.

Quite a lot of them go to Sandhurst, where they serve the valuable purpose of providing the instructors with funny stories to tell in the pub. (e.g. "decided machine gun too heavy to carry around, so buried it, and then offered to buy a replacement ". )